Insights From the MIT Sloan Admissions Team | Ep 35

who does MIT like have you ever met a jerk who wanted to make the world a better place the reality some schools are very siloed I think that's the reality and N MIT is anything but Silo it's about gaining the skills that you

need to make a difference you're going to work hard that first semester core is a lot of [Music]

work hi this is Harold Samy with the NBA Mission podcast I'm here today with my co-host Jeremy shanwell hi Jeremy nice to be back Harold and we're here as well with the assistant dean of admissions for the MIT Sloan School of Management

Donna lenson hi thank you for having me mit Salo is truly exceptional it distinguishes itself as far more than just another business school what really sets it apart is how it Blends business innovation technology and

Entrepreneurship in a way that's totally unique it's the place where cuttingedge ideas meet real world application and you can feel that energy everywhere so what makes MIT unique oh really let's

right out of the gates well actually it is the MIT so what makes MIT Sloan unique is in fact the MIT and MIT Sloan and what that means is really something different to every one

of our students what it provides is an opportunity for you as a Sloan student to take advantage of clubs conferences competitions classes throughout the

Institute as an MIT Sloan student you are also an MIT grad student in fact it begins with housing so if you choose to come to MIT Sloan and live in a dorm

with a roommate your roommate could be a PhD in physics that that makes sense when I was at MIT Sloan I lived in married student housing sadly in a building that has since been torn down just to tell you how long ago I was

there but my neighbors were some MBA students but people from really all over the campus what percentage of the students live in live in in campus housing that's a good question so there's actually more campus housing now

so I think the building you're referring to is Eastgate that's right you lived there I actually watched over two years them tear it down C cinder block by cinder block it hasn't been replaced in

its spot but really near it is now site 4 which is graduate housing and graduate Junction just opened on the other side of Campus so grad Junction brought on another 600 plus beds for grad students

so actually don't know what that number is but certainly the opportunity for people to live um on campus has increased the reality is though Sloan is very much a city school so there are

actual just apartments that are very close to campus and in some cases are closer to to Sloan than some of the the dorms are so there's lots of options from a housing standpoint right and

didn't know one student passes it to the other and the IKEA furniture lives on forever that that's right Don I'm going to tell you what I felt really unique about Sloan okay and that was this notion of I like to call it the

efficiency of effort when you get to Sloan when you get to even look at the application you think to yourself Sloan knows what's important knows what is not quite as important and really focuses on those things that are important so so

Donna picking up on the notion of the efficiency of effort how do you see that playing out particularly in the application well in the application we have a very streamlined application process as you will see we fundamentally

have a cover letter which is an essay and now a short essay we only have one letter of recommendation um we ask for just enough information to make a first assessment

as to whether or not we want to interview somebody and then at the time of interview we ask some additional information and also this notion too if you have a the first semester only is the core it's no full year core right

that's what the other thing I was going to point out we have a one semester core and then three semesters to really shape the rest of your experience you know as as you want in order to help you achieve

whatever your goals are the only um option you have within that first semester is you now must pick one elective between marketing Finance

operations and strategy okay okay and then all of your other classes are set and then what do people end up doing for those next three sem there's a whole variety of things you can do if in fact though um you're

interested in entrepreneurship Finance Enterprise management sustainability healthc care data analytics or product management you

may want to consider doing what we call certificates we have certificates in each of those seven areas you can think of a certificate as a road map or

concentration and it very much helps to create a path for some of those three semesters it helps you become part of a community of people with very similar

interests it helps you do a deep dive in a particular area um so not all because they are optional but many of our students will in fact choose to do one or more certificates during those three

semesters that makes sense and can non-s Sloan students either participate in the same classes or take do certificates themselves so the answer is both so just like Sloan students can take classes

throughout the rest of MIT vice versa so you could actually being in a finance class A SLO finance class sitting next to a PhD in chemical engineering and in particular if you think about sustainability and Healthcare or

entrepreneurship those are three areas where you can very much see entrepreneurship is so popular amongst our Sloan students we've not yet opened it up to other students and for the other two there's been a small uptick

I'm not sure how well they're publicized um so I think there's opportunity there for us but they've been designed in such a way for students throughout MIT grad students throughout MIT to be able to

participate so when we think about sort of the average loan student what are we looking at here we always think to ourselves or certainly people say to me oh are you an engineer I'm like no wasn't an engineer at all and when

people think about okay who is the average loan student and I will say to people anybody and everyone I am not a fan of averages my favorite analogy is the average weather in the United States

that's pretty meaningless if you're in Florida and the average is you know 20° or 30° that day um you know the best way to look at averages is in fact on our

class profile that we publish at the end of every year it gives you some sense but what's actually always more meaningful I think of the ranges and so for example average years of experience

for a Sloan student is in fact five however when you look at our like middle 80% it definitely runs more from 3 to s or eight so there's a much wider range

of people we look at so you talk about backgrounds um only about 30% of Any Given class are in fact do in fact have an engineering background and so what

that means is that 70% don't that's a lot we publish uh undergraduate backgrounds we publish Industries where people work and you will see they truly run the gamut we're talking about the

certificate programs we're talking about levels of Interest particularly in entrepreneurship are there areas of Sloan that you wish the school was just better known for you're like yes this is a gem for us like we're doing we're

doing something really great in this area here so Finance always comes to mind for me I know that when people think about an interest in finance which is very different today than perhaps it

was 10 years ago when you think about a career in finance perhaps Sloan is not at the top of people's list yet you show up at Sloan you look at the caliber of

our finance faculty you look at the finance ecosystem which includes clubs and conferences and people are blown away um I get that question a lot during

my interviews and I do not hesitate to share share this exact example at the end of the day MIT Salo certainly has a different feel from it from other schools and I'm just going to again go back to my own experience here when I

was looking at Business Schools I was accepted to one school I went to their big event it was big Rah event it was filled filled with people who were cheering and it was really wonderful and

it was really terrific and the next night I went to the Sloan event the Sloan event was about 20 of us and there was a professor there who was welln Arie Barnett and he said before he com to

Sloan I want to teach you I want to show you how we teach at Sloan and he basically did a very short statistics class and it was just like this is the place I'm going to it was smart he was

funny the people were really super nice but super serious so from your perspective comparing Sloan to basically everything out there what is somebody going to see at Sloan that they may not see other places so I will tell you like

I tell anybody else I'm Not In the comparison business I'm not um for a whole variety of reasons including I don't actually know a a lot about other schools and I just don't think it's my

position to compare what I can tell you about Sloan is the following we are very much a mission driven School in my own words is to identify and solve the world's biggest and most complex

problems in order to make the world a better place um there's more official words that you can read when you come visit carved on the side of our um Salone cafeteria but it's something that

we take very seriously and it's woven into the application process we talk about it through the application it's in the classroom it's in the clubs you know different clubs that we have it's in the

throughout the community and it's about wanting to make the world a better place and it's about not standing on ceremonies it's about gaining the skills that you need to make a difference so

how's that manifest like how how do you how do you teach individuals to to adapt adopt values like that like or or to or to become capable of making the world a

better place so I don't think we teach them values I I think these are people who already these values are inherent in them right who migrate towards our program okay I think what happens is

people self- select out and the population we're left with who appli to Sloan truly want to make the world a better place right and what's interest what's a byproduct of that is they tend

to be pretty nice people have you ever met a jerk who wanted to make the world a better place very fair and so we're left with an applicant pool and then eventually like a community of people

who really want to make a difference who really want to do whatever it takes who don't stand on ceremonies who are smart and creative and inventive um and

courageous and who care about other people and who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do whatever it takes to make a difference right right no that makes sense and you talked a little bit about all that's happening outside of

the Sloan classroom what are some of those things what is particularly exciting in your mind so outside of the classroom we have just at Sloan alone anywhere between now 80 and 90 clubs my

favorite example is called the happy belly Club people like to experiment with new and different foods and across all of our programs they get together on a regular basis try new restaurants try

new recipes on the other end of the spectrum are all of our professional clubs vcpe Club Consulting Club retail Club education Club you name it we have

a whole bunch of geographically focused clubs we we also have our Affinity clubs we have a black business Student Association a Hispanic Business Club slown women in management our pride club

which is for our LG lgbtq plus Community a Vets Club so what these clubs do um is in fact several things number one is they provide a community for people to either it's a community that they're

comfortable with already or a community that they're interested in exploring it provides leadership opportunities all of our clubs have multiple leadership positions and so what you're learning about leadership you're able to actually

apply in these settings many of these clubs um actually provide coaching for interviews the best example is Consulting the Consulting Club really works with people who are interested in

going into Consulting to best prepare them for their interviews they provide you know um opportunities again for you to experiment and try something that you otherwise may not have oh and many of

them actually as a marquee event will have an industrywide conference okay which is an unbelievable experience around networking project management um

getting to know people in a particular industry right the skills that the student themselves build by planning one of these conferences is just well their interactions with the people are coming to the conferences that's right because

I know they have the conference specifically Sports analytics that's a big one yeah yeah yeah and then there's a sustainability conference if I remember correct yes this this many

conferences many and I guess one piece of the SLO DNA is just this notion Innovation and Entrepreneurship sure how does Sloan think about that not just in

terms of you know the e-club or the Martin trust Center but even just as part of the DNA of the entire school it is in fact that yeah and so I think we have a fundamental belief that

entrepreneurship um entrepreneurial skills are valuable in the startup world but also in the very wellestablished corporate world because companies are

always looking to innovate themselves so these are skills that we're hoping all of our students gain you mentioned a few examples many of the entrepreneurial tools are housed in what we call the

what is called the Martin trust Center for MIT entrepreneurship very intentionally MIT and not MIT Sloan entrepreneurship although Sloan loves to call it its own and house there is the

100K competition entrepreneurial eni certificate um we have um um entrepreneurs and residents who come and spend a year at Sloan just sharing their

experiences and their advice with our students um lot there's Delta V which is a summer incubator we have one in the Boston area now and one in New York that that's really really really interesting

that's fairly new I think in the sense of you if I understand correctly you finish a business plan maybe you participate in the 100K you then have the summer after you graduate to then

actually launch the company yep so that is possible some some people who really have figured it out can do it between the first and second year but it's also open to people after their second year

as well um there's the sandbox which is a little bit less rigid um it's it's less resources also but really anybody who has an idea that they want to explore through the sandbox they're

given some funding and you hear the stories all the time of the people in the cafeteria in the coffee line who strike up a conversation the other that

is really valuable that in some cases is organic and in other times we'll say is a little bit forced in a good way is the relationship between MIT Sloan students

and the rest of Campus whether they be undergrads or grad students who have the ideas but have no idea how to scale them or take them to market right and they then partner up with the Sloan student

who has the business sense and that's where great things happen no that makes sense and I'll give again some my own personal experiences the Martin trust Center you are actually talking to the Martin trust Award winner right here but

but um the Martin trust Center the thing that I always love about it even more now is just how open it is this notion here of practically anyone can walk in

grab some coffee I may be in a little bit of the comparison business and all I can say is at the at the Martin trust Center at MIT you walk in you can meet people you can sort of bump into people

takes advantage of the free food I hope I'm not sort of you know you're totally releasing any secrets and then there is another University not that far away that has its own entrepreneurship Center and basically you need a security

clearance even to get through that door that that there's this notion there's no bias in this podcast exactly this is the no bias listen the reality some schools are very siloed I think that's the

reality n MIT is anything but silot what I want to just switch gears entirely and I want to take a step back from what the program is about and just address one other type of applicant and that's the Deferred applicant we haven't really

talked with that person and uh what what has been your experience thus far with the Deferred admissions process and what is a deferred admit need to show you to reveal that they're mature enough to all

this freedom because there's so I wouldn't have been I'm telling you right now I would not ready to have all that I think majority is key so we launched our

deferred admissions program um in 2019 um and so we've now been doing it for this will be our sixth year it's not just for MIT undergrads I think that's a

misperception out there so it's for anybody who is finishing up undergrad or grad school I mean fundamentally you just have not worked full-time right um

and you can apply to our MBA program get admitted and then go work for 2 to 5 Years From what are we looking for standpoint we we have to be looking for

very similar qualities as we are in our traditional MBA because that's who you're going to be and so we use all of the same we call them competencies that we're looking for we just know to look

for them in slightly different places and so the best example I can give is around relationship building very important quality for us u in our traditional MBA candidate we're looking

for evidence of meaningful relationship building in the workplace for our early candidates were looking for it perhaps in a club that you've been in on campus

or if you play a sport or in the classroom we do ask for more letters of recommendation um for our MBA earlies cuz we feel because we feel that you

know faculty can provide some of the data that we're looking for oh and we don't ask for no chart cuz we know they haven't been so no work chart but everything else is very similar and again it's really

important that you know if you're thinking about who our candidates are on a Continuum they are on the early stage of the same Continuum as our students

who are eventually um admitted through the regular process we reach out after the first two years and connect with people and say are you ready next year are you ready next year they actually

sign up for a call with one of our admissions advisors this doesn't often happen but if they'd been sitting on the couch for 2 years um that's not okay right yeah and so it's in their best

interest you know we're fundamentally the spirit of this is that they've been doing substantive work and I I promise you 95% of people have been doing substantive work but we want to make

sure of that sure they have to tell us that they're serious by the end of the round one deadline and they become part of our round one pool how many deferred admits are were there in the last MIT

class yeah so the last class was maybe 15% don't quote me on that a lot of lot of pressure on the pool like there there are fewer

spots these are these are really really good candidates like these are very I mean we always talk about the outliers which is unfair because then it casts a shadow on everything else these are very

very strong candidates these are people who most likely when we're interviewing them in April they've already secured a job they've secured a job in many cases with company who's going to sponsor them

for an MBA down the road um these are people who if we didn't give them the opportunity now they're going to go somewhere else for the most part right right right right no that makes sense then there's no particular demographic

it used to be that you know some deferred programs were trying to get more women in their pipeline or trying to get more science people in their pipeline whatever it might be there's no particular agenda in the in the Deferred

pipeline that you guys so one might have argued that early on when there were only a few schools but now that so many schools offer it you're pretty much you're just fighting for good talent early on that's really all it is it's an

early draft and if you're not participating and I'm not being critical of any school that who isn't um but you're really missing out on some really top candidates right right know that

makes sense then um Donna who does MIT like when when you see an applicant like like is there one through line I recognize that that again no averages here the reality is you're taking people

from all sorts of different backgrounds s all sorts of different um experiences is there you look at somebody you're like they're an MIT person or maybe they're not an MIT person so I'm not sure I'm going to answer your question

exactly but this is what I tell people when they ask questions like yours um fundamentally we're looking for three things we're looking for a demonstrated ability to be successful in a slone

classroom so that's really you know one would argue academic Excellence but we can see that in many ways through your undergraduate um GPA your undergraduate major perhaps you undergrad School uh

your work the work that you're doing and your work success GM G we're looking for people who and I think this is probably a differentiator who have demonstrated the willingness desire ability to make

an impact make a difference make a contribution that's really key then the third is around interpersonal skills someone who is a good team player and teammates somebody who others would want to be around and I've done I mean

there's not that many combinations of this but I've done you know what if they had two out of the three and quite frankly any two out of those three and it's not going to work okay so

fundamentally these are three areas um that we're really really looking for so much of the work that you're going to do both at school and when you go in the workforce you know I used to say and this shows how old I am she didn't

retire that long ago but unless you're Serena Williams you're pretty much you know that's an individual contributor true and true but um for the most part you're working with other people and so

having the right skill set knowing when to lead and how effectively lead and when to perhaps follow really important skills as you think about folks who are really going to start at MIT Salone is there anything you you think that'll

really surprise them there yes so this is what surprises people there's two things I would say um and neither one of them are ADM mission's fault cuz we tell you about both of them one is you're going to work

hard that first semester core is a lot of work a lot of academic work um you're coming to school you're coming to business school it has the word School

in it it's so it's surprising how many people are a little bit surprised of just how much school work there is and we tell them the second is really around

Community which again we tell people but until you feel it I don't think people fully appreciate it um I like to walk around maybe the third week of September

and run into people I interviewed or I've met along the way and ask them so what surprises you and undoubtedly they will say I know everybody talked about the community everybody talked about

slony helping slones but wow it's real like I love my cohort I love my core team you know this is just amazing yeah again even though we've told them about

it I'll say this about core teams you know the majority of people love their core teams they're in their weddings there are those core teams though who count on the days till the

semester's over I mean listen that's yeah that's and a question that I get around that that I actually love when people ask so I'm going to ask for you to is how do you create the core teams

and how do you create these cohorts um because again we really want them to be representative of the whole Community up until three years ago it was a master

spreadsheet with key Fields like gender and geography and um undergraduate major uh industry that you work in job

function and they the program office not admissions but the program office would be doing a whole lot of filtering to get you six relatively even teams three years ago one of our faculty members

wrote an AI engine that now does it in about 20 minutes um I think that's a great story yeah that's pretty nice very MIT yeah very very okay so a couple

things Donna that I want to make sure we cover is first of all just how are classes taught at MIT Sal oh thank you so much for asking so we've talked a lot about our students flexibility in terms of those three semesters to be honest

our faculty have lots of flexibility too so we are not a one-sized fit all school we are not a case-based school each of our faculty truly have the ability to teach um as he or she sees fit and as a

result you have classes that are traditional lectures and problem sets you do have some case-based classes we have lots of project-based classes lots and lots and we have a category of projects that are our action learning

Labs so experiential learning is really big at Sloan and it actually aligns really well with the motto of MIT itself mind in hand meny Manus um and so these

action learning lab classes of which now we have close to 20 of them they either focus on a subject matter or they focus on a geography yeah so from a geography

standpoint we have an Assan lab we have USA lab um we now have Mina lab and these are where you as part of a team are working on a project for a real

company helping a real company solve a real problem I'm going to just sort of interrupt parenthetical here I just find the USA lab amazing because USA for certain people means one portion of

geography one portion of the country and for USA lab it means something very different going to places that are underserved in a lot of ways absolutely fishing villages in Seattle um one comes

to mind in um a a school district in a small town in Maine was another project I remember a few years ago as well like really interesting places where people are going all of these projects are

sourced well in advance of the start of the semester um you know in at the beginning of the semester all of the projects are laid out people either come as a team or can be put in a team and

you know there's a bit of a matching process so all of the projects are explained you as a student prioritize and then there's a bit of a match and everyone can take one action lab is that

how it works oh you can take more so action learning is not a requirement to complete your MBA degree however if you're doing one of our seven certificates yeah that I talked about each one of those has in fact a lab

required okay that makes sense then similar can you talk about the The Innovation periods and the the role it has in in the educational experience so at Sloan and this is not throughout MIT

but at Sloan we have a break in the middle of each semester the fall and the spring um this week in the middle has undergone a variety of names I think for many people sip is what the familiar

name is which was Sloan Innovation period slan intensive period it it's fundamentally a weak we break in traditional classes there's lots of

workshops around perhaps leadership and so then there's lots of opportunities for other non-traditional workshops to be taken in the spring the Sip week is

right before our uh MIT wide spring break so that's a twoe period without classes if you're doing a spring action learning lab class you're traveling during that middle time period that

makes sense and of course there's the classic MIT experience which is the independent activity period uh during all of January that slen students can also participate in so the month of

January at MIT is IAP so what happens is the fall semester is from the first week in September through mid December is in the holidays many schools return in session right after the first of the

year MIT does not MIT does not start its spring semester till February 1 or whatever that Monday is right around it and that whole month of January is

really open for really interesting types of works and this has been an MIT Legacy for many many many years you can write a bus plan in January or you can go to something called the charm school which

is to help people just sharpen their social skills which some of us need people are familiar a while ago there was a book in a movie called 21 around

poker and playing poker all all that just an MIT story yeah and so poker is very popular in MIT and so learning how to play po poker a very popular course

during IAP um one would argue that cooking especially baking is all really built on chemistry so there's baking CL like it's

really meant to be extremely exploratory um to be honest first year mbaas many of them are actually using that time period to secure an internship if they haven't

already and many second-year mbas have taken G lab Global entrepreneurship lab in the fall and so they're traveling that January to their company all over the world Donna the one thing I'd love

to say to people about MIT is MIT just doesn't have to be the business school you want to go to it's the only school you want to go to I personally felt like MIT Salone is like no other place in the world it was just a wonderful experience

I don't want to give too much of a commercial here by all means but but through alies MIT saloan is just a a wonderful place so on that note this is Harold sesi NBA Mission with my co-host

Jeremy sheinwald and the assistant dean of admissions for MIT s School of Management Don Elon thank you very much so much for joining oh thank you very much for having me it's been a pleasure